From the Translator's Introduction:"The Organs of the Brain is quite representative of the style of farce which was abundantlypopular in western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the typeepitomized in the Figaro plays of Pierre Beaumarchais, the comic operas of GioacchinoRossini, and the sentimental plays of Elizabeth Inchbald. It has all the usual elements ofsuch theatre: cross-dressing, deceit, clown figures, a bombastic lord, sneaky servants,clever women, stupid men, threats of violence, emotional blackmail, police involvement,and complicated polygons - not just triangles - of love. All in all, these formulaic elementsgive us the impression of prefiguring the Jeeves and Wooster stories of P.G. Wodehouse."

August von Kotzebue

The Organs of the Brain

A Farce in Three Actstranslated by Eric v.d. Luftwith an introduction, an essay, and an extensive bibliography of the first decade of phrenology

The need has long existed to account for the great variety of material which waswritten and printed in hundreds of works by other authors besides Franz JosephGall between the time when Gall first announced his skull theories in 1798 andthe time when he finally published them himself in 1810. Quite a few phrenologicalbibliographies have been published, notably those of Choulant (1844), Möbius(1903 and 1905), Temkin (1947), Lantéri-Laura (1970), Heintel (1985), andWyhe (2004). But the bibliography attached to this translation of Kotzebue's playis the most nearly complete of any which have so far appeared for this period.